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Next time you are craving a pizza, instead of calling up your
local mom-and-pop shop to place your order, you may be looking to
Amazon to deliver your pie.

That's right -- Amazon appears poised to make another move into
the local marketplace with an upcoming takeout-delivery service
to compete with companies like GrubHub and Seamless, reports say.

The new service will be a part of Amazon Local, a daily-deal service
similar to Groupon and will have its initial launch on iOS in
Seattle.
TechCrunch first reported the news after the feature was
reportedly turned on for a brief period before being taken down
again.

The online-retail giant has also reportedly been in contact with
already-established local service companies like the San
Francisco-based Thumbtack, a company that connects customers to
more than 60,000 service providers.

Amazon is yet to confirm the details but reports say the company
is planning to expand the takeout service to other cities
gradually and eventually globally, in a similar fashion to the
rollout of its grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh.

Reports say Amazon is also considering expansion through
acquisition. Among the companies Amazon may be considering are
Peach, a local takeout service in Seattle, Maryland and Virginia
and Caviar, a similar service operating in San Francisco,
Chicago, Washington D.C., New York and Boston that offers free
GPS tracking on customers’ orders.

Besides being known for offering just about anything to
customers, the new push into local commerce is in line with
Amazon’s strategy to become the go-to company for many
small-business owners.

Besides providing a marketplace for entrepreneurs to sell
products on, Amazon already provides a host of backend products
such as Amazon Web Services, a platform with various cloud
computing offerings that allows companies to scale quickly. It
also recently rolled out subscription payments for startups.

Earlier this month
Reuters reported that Amazon also plans to launch a
locals-services marketplace to compete with Yelp and Angie’s
List. Although services will be new territory for the retail
giant, Amazon has already experimented with services like free
installation for Nest thermostats.